Empire building by writing and speaking, for writers, speakers, and publishers

Category: fiction

MAGAZINES and NEWSPAPERS 1. Here is the two-item formula for selling nonfiction copy to magazines and newspapers: (a) You sell more than 75% of your freelance writing by writing only when you have better than a 50% chance of a sale, and (b) You have better than a 50% chance of a sale by […]

[I’m a publisher and I read all the mail that our readers send. Sometimes (not very often) we have a story or a section of a book that brings lots of spontaneous letters of joy and praise from readers. “Trees and Kids” is the hands-down winner. It’s by Jim Burgett in his 2007 book (in […]

Trying to find a grabber website domain ending in “.com” that contains less than an arm’s length of letters is a near-fruitless treasure hunt. You probably can’t use “.org” and will anybody come if it ends in “.net”? The hunt is over. Last February, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), an international […]

(1) “Ebooks have grown exponentially and reached a healthy balance by 11/14,” says Mark Coker, head of Smashwords in a no-nonsense delivery at BAIPA (Bay Area Independent Publishers Assn) on Nov. 8. Here is a much-abbreviated summary of Mark’s very enjoyable 10-point presentation. When Mark began Smashwords, about it 8 years ago, ebooks accounted for […]

Mark Coker started Smashwords when a quarter of 1% of U.S. books sold were ebooks. Now it’s 35% of the total, and he’s a top spokesman in the field. Last year Smashwords authors sold ebooks worth $30-million at retail. Last Saturday (11/8/14) Coker spoke to BAIPA (Bay Area Independent Publisher Association) in Novato, CA (near […]

Last week this blog was the core item in my newsletter. I had so much response from it I’m sharing it as a (long) blog too. Two questions: (1) Why would you even care about selling your books to libraries, much less their lower-priced digital versions? (2) And what’s so different about it anyway? Don’t […]

What do you want your book to do? Probably (1) get bought–or at least read; (2) make you money; (3) if self-published, get snagged by a “big house” and do more of [1] and [2]; (4) establish you as an “expert” or “authority” in its topic field; (5) get potential readers to want to know […]

I think of top-selling two ways. The most obvious is to sell more copies of your book than any other book like it in the market. If you sell 10,000 copies of the book, you outsold a person who sold 5,000. Duh. The less obvious way is to measure the effectiveness of your book’s sale. […]

I was asked what blogs I had about “open” publishing. Here they are, below, and I’m certain there are more too so if you have a specific word or topic you are hunting for, please type it in the search box to see if it pops up! The publishers mentioned in the blogs are Kindle, […]

So here you are with a dandy book that millions of hungry readers want to buy and hide on their tablets, readers, or computers—but you can’t get it from Word (.doc or .docx) or other formats into .ePub. You probably want to use .ePub to post your book with an “open” publisher like Kobo or […]